Tag: Malware

Will you be ransomware’s next victim? Can ransomware encrypt your data and hold it hostage until you pay a ransom?

Organizations large and small across industries and around the globe are at risk of a ransomware attack. The media mostly reports attacks at large institutions, such as the Hollywood Hospital that suffered over a week offline in 2016 after a ransomware attack encrypted files and demanded ransom to decrypt the data.

The data is still coming in, but it’s looking like consumer spending this holiday season will once again outperform previous years. Multiple research firms including the National Retail Federation (NRF) are predicting a growth in sales over the same period in 2015. Credit card vendor Mastercard is forecasting a 19% increase in online sales over the holidays.

What would happen if you gathered five days of newly discovered malware and unleashed it upon an end-point protected by SonicWall?

I have been working with SonicWall firewalls for 10 years, and I was beta testing SonicWall Capture as part of my role here as an escalation engineer. Since we are big believers in drinking our own champagne, I was testing on my home network.

The 2016 Holiday shopping season is well underway, and we are poised for a record-setting year.

The National Retail Federation reports that over 154 million consumers shopped over the Thanksgiving weekend, up nearly 2% from 2015. A very telling statistic highlights the brick-and-mortar vs. online shopping trend: the survey found that 44% of shoppers went online, whereas 40% shopped in-store.

It’s August 5, 2016 and you settle down at your computer to watch the Olympic opening ceremony. You have no fear of catching Zika, unlike the thousands of people in Rio. Feeling safe, you navigate to the official broadcast site of the games and click on Watch the Olympics live.

One of my first customers in IT was a large retailer, with more than a thousand stores. This was at a time when e-commerce was just beginning, at least for large, traditional retailers. Giving their customers the ability to purchase on the web was still a year or two away.

This retailer made about 90 percent of its annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

I started this year speaking and writing about how retail establishments can protect themselves from the rising tide of malware. I continue this train of thought by considering the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) as a general guidance to protect any small business.

Instead of looking at PCI-DSS as guidelines for protecting cardholder data, consider it as guidance for protecting any critical data.

It’s the holiday season and that means we’re all busy with fun activities. Take online shopping for example. Many of us will do it between Black Friday and New Year’s, even for just a little while. Some of us do it at work. When employees spend time shopping online during work hours it presents challenges for any organization.